The New Road

Chuck - How cool is this

Normally when Hollywood tries to do geek they fail spectacularly, but not Chuck:

Not only is this a serious geek book on XSLT, which is wickedly nasty tech topic, but it's also the best book on XSLT. Which means they actually know what the hell they are talking about. Sweet!

What happened to the pill-head?

I haven't heard anyone talking about the pillhead and how he wants President Obama (still love saying that) to fail. Oh well, shooting star...

Dog And Baby

And now for something really cute:

Hey, Glen, when you launch a new site to a national audience, you might want to load test it first:

Indeed, service is very unavailable. Nice metaphor.

Moron We Surround Them

Some more-on of the moron doing the We Surround Them thing. Glenn Beck really is just batshit crazy nuts. He starts off this video talking about how we will soon resort to cannibalism. No shit. Seriously. I was just expecting the usual grade Beck lunacy, but when he is off the air he is like 10,000% batshit crazier.

We Surround Them

Glenn Beck thinks he has us surrounded and wants his followers to out themselves sometime soon. Not today. But real soon now.

Apparently if you agree with 7 out of the 9 following statements you are a Glenn Beck follower. Let's give it a try.

1. America is good.

Yep. The idea that lefties believe America is inherently evil is a straw man created by the looney right.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

Ok, good for you. It's not what I believe in however. And we shouldn't have government going around funding religion like we did with Bush.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

I'm there with you, but I don't see that at all in what you do, Mr. Beck. Your a batshit crazy lunatic who has zero capability to self-reflect and thus speak complete garbage one day and has no memory of it the next.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

I certainly get the intent and in most cases I agree. But what if you and your wife are child abusers?

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

I completely agree here, which is why I still don't understand why we aren't prosecuting the Bush administration. Come on! We found out yesterday that Cheney had a hit squad run out of the west wing. Shouldn't we prosecute that?

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

Ok.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

I agree. But roads, bridges, schools, police, and firemen are not charity.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

Hah! I love it. This is treason at a time of war when lefties did it when Bush was in power. But now it's free speech to be defended. Good for you Mr. Beck. Glad you see it our way this week. Let's see how you play it the next time the righties are in power.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

I agree that they work for me. That being said, if you rape, kill or abuse someone you sure as shit are going to answer for it. See #5.

The statements are so broad that it's easy enough to partially agree with most of them. So I'm probably good for 7 out 9. I guess I'm a Beck-head. Or whatever the hell they call themselves.

I'm not a Beck-head though, so let me add a few more from my observations of the looney right to maybe hone it in a little further:

10. I'm a batshit crazy armageddon freak who wants secession now that Obama is in office.

11. I have the right to live without medical insurance, but if I am then in a car accident while uninsured I expect to be saved at any expense and have that cost written off.

12. I believe in the government intruding into family decision making (e.g. Terri Schiavo).

13. I don't think the military is part of the government, so unlimited spending on military hardware is a-ok.

14. I believe in me-myself alone. Everything I have is mine. I share it with nobody. The roads are mine, the bridges are mine, the police and firemen serve me alone. And I shouldn't have to pay a dime for any of it. The world revolves around me.

15. I believe that Christians are a down-trodden minority in this country even though they make up 80% of the population.

16. I believe the Bush years were an unheralded success story just waiting to be written and the bad economy is Obama's fault even though he has only been in office for a month.

And on and on, you get the point.

Colbert Rips Ayn Rand A New One

Stephen Colbert does an excellent job slamming Ayn Rand and the Objectivist/Libertarian me-firsters. This is a must-watch to get your hands around the mindset of the fringe right. The thing I find so amusing about this is how Libertarianism is almost completely at odds with Christianity, and yet somehow the true right-wing faithful seem to embrace both at the same time. Cognitive dissonance baby! Love it! Live it!

The Voice Of Victoria Jackson

Ex-SNL comic Victoria Jackson is now showing up as shrill voice of the loony right. Is it just me or are all of the conservatives starting to sound the same? If it's not communist this, it's socialist that. And is any of this fixing anything? No. All we get from the right is ranting nowadays. It's boring.

Evangelical destroys the right

Wow, check out this guy as he just body checks the right:

Right at the end, from about 7:20 on he just lets it all go. Wow.

Colbert's Doom Bunker

Oh, this is just too awesome:

Conservatives: In charge again

Conservatives have a formula for power. If they can win elections and hold majorities, then it's majority rules, and to the rest, "shut up! shut up!" If they can't hold the majority then they start carping about how we are a Republic and not a Democracy. A Republic is ruled by the minority you see. Which is so much better than a Democracy anyway, because now and again, the wrong people vote and mistakenly kick conservatives out of office. It couldn't possibly be because conservatism has failed. Oh no.

One true believer for the Republic cause is staff sergeant anonymous here:

We pay his salary and in return he gives us his recipe for sedition. It's one part Republic vs. Democracy, and one part second amendment rant. Let's hope the whole adds up to a court martial.

On the one hand, this wing-nuttery pisses me off. I pay this guys salary and here he is lecturing me on how he is this great patriot who is going to overthrow the government. On the other hand I'm thinking, "you go girl!" Not that I want him to succeed. I just love seeing these kooks driving more moderates away from the Republican party. Go on birthers! Lecture us all about how Obama's birth certificate is fake. Go on Limbaugh! Tell us about how you want Obama to fail (which is exactly what he said). Go on Beck! Tell us about how building roads and schools is just like Stalin! Go on!

The right does an excellent job of driving people away from their party when they shift into hard right mode. Remember the Clinton impeachment? Clinton had a sixty percent approval rating before the impeachment, and a seventy percent approval after. So please, conservatives, go to the hard-hard right. Tell us about how you will take up arms and overthrow the government for having the audacity to build schools, fix bridges and provide health care. It will work! I'm telling yah!

I would love for their to be a moderate conservative party in this country that could be a reasonably check on Obama. That's how it should be. But we don't have that. We have a bunch of dittoheads disguised as a political party who need to be taught a lesson in just how unpopular their ideas really are. I can only hope that they start listening and internalizing what's been said about Bush. But they won't. The hallmark of the true conservative is a total inability to self-reflect.

Rock Band 2 - Critique

At this point I've played enough Rock Band 2 to make some critiques. Yes, it is an amazing game. That being said, there are some flaws:

• You should be able to change in an out of no-fail mode without dismissing the whole band by going back to the main menu. If you have kids you know their interests waver. So being able to get in an out of no-fail without too much hassle would be appreciated.
• You should be able to save playlists so that you can practice on them over and over. I have a set of songs that I like to drum to that emphasize different sets of drum techniques and it's a pain in the ass having to select them over and over again.
• There aren't enough ballads, even in the downloadable content.
• We could use some Blues, in particular Bonnie Raiitt or B. B. King.
• Some seriously big names are missing; Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Doors, etc.
• I know it would make the download sizes huge, but it would be nice to have the music videos for some of these songs, like Lips does.

Again, it's an amazing game and I am happy with it. I just think it could use a few tweaks.

Update: As if on cue the Rock Band folks will release a whole album of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble on Thursday.

Michael Steele - Rush's bitch

Here is Michael Steele, head of the RNC, over the weekend:

"So let’s put it into context here. Let’s put it into context here. Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer. Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes, it’s incendiary. Yes, it’s ugly."

Which is in some sense true. He is an entertainer in the sense that he uses the term comedian as a way around slander and hate speech laws. But I digress... Anywho, pillhead took offense and so Michael Steele must bend to his will...

“My intent was not to go after Rush – I have enormous respect for Rush Limbaugh,” Steele said in a telephone interview. “I was maybe a little bit inarticulate. … There was no attempt on my part to diminish his voice or his leadership.” […]

“I went back at that tape and I realized words that I said weren’t what I was thinking,” Steele said. “It was one of those things where I thinking I was saying one thing, and it came out differently. What I was trying to say was a lot of people … want to make Rush the scapegoat, the bogeyman, and he’s not.”

Hah, hah, hah. Republicans, you have no party. You have a fan club for Rush Limbaugh! This is classic. Whenever someone rightly calls out Rush for saying the insane and unthinkable they have to kneel before him and pay penance.

Rush is a drug-addled vicious little piece of shit. And this whole hoping Obama fails thing is disgusting. I never hoped Bush would fail. I hoped he would do the right thing, and I registered my objection to his policies. But I never ever, as Limbaugh does, hoped that the economy would fail in order to teach the electorate some type of lesson.

Food porn... literally

I've always thought that the Food Network, particularly when it comes to Everyday Italian, is more porn that food. Now Rachel Ray has upped the ante with some PG rated photo shoot for FHM magazine. Never really thought of her that way... but she is pretty cute.

Poor paying for health care for the rich

Here is Neil Cavuto giving his idea for health care reform:

According to him having the rich pay for health care for the poor is 'ass backwards'. Which means that the poor should pay for his healthcare? Do these people even think before they talk?